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Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone
- dwedge 5mo agoGiven how many of these were running android, I'm surprised Mudita Kompakt wasn't listed.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoI usually buy either Xiaomi or Oppo phones and I am pretty happy.
- vovavili 5mo agoStill a "Google phone" as per the definition of this article. They're looking for Linux-based non-Android phones.
- retired 5mo agoAre Xiaomi phones still legal in the EU with their proprietary chargers? All phones need to have USB-C and USB-PD now.
- dobladov 5mo agoWhich proprietary charger? I always had Xiaomi phones and they always use USB ports.
- retired 5mo agoXiaomi uses a proprietary charging protocol, I believe it is called Hypercharge. It also requires a proprietary cable with an extra pin/chip.
- dobladov 5mo agoLooks like they opened the protocol, https://new.c.mi.com/global/post/1895204 https://new.c.mi.com/global/post/1895204 Also, it's only for fast charging, you can use any other charger or wire without an issue.
- nguyenkien 5mo agoYou can charge it just fine with regular usb-c charger. So not a problem.
- retired 5mo agoAt very limited charging speeds though. That goes against the USB-PD mandate.
- Carbon1603 5mo agoI haven't noticed that when I tried them out. It was still charging faster than the Pixel or iPhone.
- surgical_fire 5mo agoThe wife has a Xiaomi phone, we live in EU. It was sold normally as any other cellphone.
- lproven 5mo ago> Are Xiaomi phones still legal in the EU Yes. I wrote the article. I use one. > with their proprietary chargers? Not true. It's a generic USB-C device. Does fast charge off any high-power charger, e.g. a Raspberry Pi one.
- bogdan 5mo agoWhich brand do you prefer? I'm currently looking at both Xiaomi 17 Ultra and Oppo Find x9 Ultra.
- DeathArrow 5mo agoBoth are fine. :)
- lproven 5mo agoI wrote the article. My daily driver is a Xiaomi Poco F5. It is near the end of its life now -- struggles to last the day -- and it was stuffed with bloatware, but it was good for the price in 2023. My previous handset was an Umidigi F2 which was much better value for money. I will probably go back to them, or another budget brand such as Dooyoo, Blackview, Ulefone, etc.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoI really want to try one of these one day: https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/promoted/ https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/promoted/ But I haven't dared yet because I kind of expect it will not be able to replace my current phone.
- realusername 5mo agoUbuntu Touch was amazing, way ahead of Android and iOS when it came out, the touch gestures were so much better than what was available. But then it's just maintained by very few people nowadays and half abandoned. You can buy a used Pixel 3a if you want to toy around with it, they cost nothing.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoThat's so sad. I even clicked around on their page to find out how I could contribute as a developer, but their gitlab repo seems abandoned since way before the latest release and all "how to get involved" articles eventually point to 404 pages.
- opan 5mo agoYou might have more luck searching "ubports". https://ubports.com/ https://ubports.com/ Personally I would recommend postmarketOS + plasma mobile instead, but I didn't think ubports/lomiri were dead yet.
- sigmoid10 5mo agoThe original site already leads there. That's where the dead links are for getting involved.
- amelius 5mo agoIs anyone successfully running Android inside a container in Linux, for their daily apps?
- drzaiusx11 5mo agoThis was the only way to run Bedrock Minecraft for a hot minute on my kids machines
- anta40 5mo agoSo which one has the biggest chance to be Android/iOS alternative? Many many years ago, smarphone users had these choices: Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, PalmOS... what else?
- ajdude 5mo agoWindows phone still had the best ux of any smartphone, I just wish the ecosystem was there. To this day nothing even comes close to smart tiles.
- vladsanchez 5mo agoAMEN! I loved my Lumia and TRULY nothing beat the UX-ability of the Tiles system.
- pavlov 5mo agoJolla still exists: https://jolla.com/ https://jolla.com/ They develop Sailfish, a non-Google Linux-based mobile OS that can apparently run Android apps decently in a sandbox.
- ttkari 5mo agoThey are also less than 2 months away from the first deliveries of the Jolla Phone 2026, a new SailfishOS device they have designed and built from scratch. Over the past years the official Sailfish experience has largely been relying on Sony Open Device program - a co-operation which hasn't always been very smooth for the customers. I have been daily driving SFOS on a Sony Xperia 10 III for the past 3 years and it works well for me. I think the 10 III is the current "peak Sailfish" at least among the officially supported devices but this should change once the new phones roll out in early July. For new orders of the 2026 phone they are currently aiming for delivery in September in the supported markets (EU, UK, Norway and Switzerland).
- bobim 5mo agoI have rage-quit apple for a C2 and the muscle memory still kicks in after months. The ergonomy of Sailfish is sometimes bizarre, the little top left dot for navigation for example. Still it does everything I need, just with a very bad camera. Let's hope the 2026 will fix that.
- ttkari 5mo agoOh but you don't usually need to care for the dot itself so much as it's just an indicator that you can do a middle swipe left/right to move between stacked pages.
- bobim 5mo agoAh yes, that explains it all! I'm still learning how to unlearn.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
- smeggysmeg 5mo agoI moved to a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS a few weeks ago. I can do everything I need to, everything I want to, and with more control over my digital footprint and what data is being collected about me. I've completely moved off Google services. The OS experience is pretty impressive for not being made by an evil megacorp. The hardware is fairly midrange, but midrange today is last year's top end, and unless you're some expert photographer or needing phone VR or whatever, it's a great, normal smartphone experience. I'm donating to the open source devs who make my apps, and they respond when I ask for useful features instead of always enshittifying it. For the corpo apps, it pulls from Google Play.
- han1 5mo ago/e/ OS lied about the security and how "degoogled" the phone really is because it sends data to Google for MicroG
- smeggysmeg 5mo agoOnly to the extent you use Micro-G, and Micro-G mitigates a large portion of the Google data harvesting. The built in App Lounge does not require a Google login to pull downloads from the Play Store, so it's possible to remain entirely anonymous to Google.
- microtonal 5mo agoIt's not, it starts sending all kinds of information to Google from the very first time you unlock the phone: https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-nicht-zwangslaeufig-sicher-custom-roms-teil6/ https://www.kuketz-blog.de/e-datenschutzfreundlich-bedeutet-... They also run proprietary Google blobs in a privileged process to pass basic Play Integrity and give certain Google apps higher privileges than the normal Android sandbox. Aside from Google, Fairphone 6 (both the stock OS and /e/OS) ship with proprietary, Chinese TCL blobs for image processing (most likely also privileged). Besides that, /e/OS often uses way outdated Linux kernel versions and firmware bundles with many known CVEs and old major Android versions, having many unfixed vulnerabilities that are not marked high/critical (ASBs only give you high/critical fixes). Fairphone does not have a secure enclave, only TrustZone. So, secrets can be extracted using frequently-found side-channel accounts. The lack of a secure enclave + the many available CVEs, it will probably fail within seconds when using data extraction tools like Cellebrite, even when the phone is locked. So better not bring your phone to demonstrations or border crossings. But hey, it doesn't matter, because Murena's CEO says security hardening is only for spies and pedophiles. (Friends don't recommend friends Fairphone or /e/OS.)
- janvlug 5mo agoI use a Librem5 Linux phone. With the default PureOS operating system. Enjoy your freedom, break free from Google and Apple. Have a full Linux computer in your pocket that you can also use for calling. See also the discussion on this post: https://mastodon.social/@janvlug/116504044251287290 https://mastodon.social/@janvlug/116504044251287290
- echelon 5mo ago> Enjoy your freedom, break free from Google and Apple. You can't escape it. Your friends and employers and banks use it. The state will soon mandate it for ID. It's the accepted worldwide compute platform, and you're being the nail that sticks out. Your usage is subject to breaking randomly, being unsupported, losing access or being banned by stepping outside the traffic lines, etc. They'll use attestation, certs and signing, proprietary APIs, and the scale and might of trillions of dollars to force this. The only way to "break free" and "enjoy your freedom" is via regulation and -- the better option -- trust busting. The EU and ASEAN are the best bets for regulation. Getting another Lina Khan that works faster next time is the next best bet for regulation, and possibly a superior outcome that could result in a breakup opening up mobile for true competition. Being weird in the 0.0001% will not last, nor does it help anyone else escape this monopolistic tyranny. We need the government to pave the way for dozens of Apple/Google competitors. Or to horizontally split these two companies into dozens of "Baby Bells" that are forced to fight one another.
- graemep 5mo agoI use a smartphone less than most people. Things I already could not do without a Google or Apple phone: Use some banking apps. In fact I cannot use one banking app I otherwise would because it will only work if you have no non-store apps installed at all. A regulatory requirement to prove my ID without using the mobile app would be a 20 min+ each way drive (plus walking, time doing it etc.) to another town. > The EU and ASEAN are the best bets for regulation. Did you read the recent HN stories about the EU's age verification app that will only work on attested phones? Lots of other governments (EU and non-EU) doping similar things. > We need the government to pave the way for dozens of Apple/Google competitors. Or to horizontally split these two companies into dozens of "Baby Bells" that are forced to fight one another. I have very little confidence that is likely. Politically governments are far more pro-big business and anti-competition than they have been in a long time. > Being weird in the 0.0001% will not last, nor does it help anyone else escape this monopolistic tyranny. Every single person who does not go along, is a a political and commercial argument not to remove alternatives. If I use a website and an app to bank or buy something, it pushes up the stats for the web app vs the mobile app.
- bekon 5mo ago[dead]
- johnsea 5mo agoThis article fails to mention GrapheneOS. The article starts with Murena, Punkt, Volla which are all based on Android. If you do this, then imho you must mention GrapheneOS, the by far better option (updates, privacy, security, organisation). Google Pixel with GrapheneOS is the best non-Google phone... ;-)
- gib444 5mo agoGrapheneOS requires a Google Pixel (currently) though. That's why they omitted it I imagine
- Freak_NL 5mo ago[flagged]
- someguyiguess 5mo agoYou might want to re-read the headline.
- gib444 5mo agoPlease try a bit harder to respond within the context
- hulitu 5mo ago> This article fails to mention GrapheneOS. From Wikipedia: "GrapheneOS[b] (/ˈɡræfiːn.oʊˈɛs/) is a free and open-source, privacy- and security-focused, Android-based operating system" So still Android.
- gunalx 5mo agoAs much as I like graphene it is literary running on google hardware (atm) and uses asop. Even if it is a really good option is you want to run degoogled and secure android.
- throawayonthe 5mo ago
- trvz 5mo ago> But can I run my apps? > Well, probably, yes. Even with "probably" as a qualifier, this is disingenuous. Not even Android has caught up to the highest tier of apps available on iOS.
- mmooss 5mo ago> highest tier of apps available on iOS. which apps do you mean?
- ElFitz 5mo agoI looked at Punkt. They keep saying "If you don’t pay for the product, you are the product". Okay, all fine and well. But what will my phone still actually be able to do if / when I stop my subscription? Not a single clear answer besides "[…] gradual feature deactivation, and ultimately reverting to a device running AOSP". Doesn’t really inspire confidence.
- Barbing 5mo agoSwiss privacy phones? https://www.punkt.ch https://www.punkt.ch What subscription?
- lloeki 5mo agoLook at Punkt MC03 + AphyOS, scroll down to "Subscription: 2 years free of charge" and expand. https://www.punkt.ch/products/mc03-premium-secure-smartphone https://www.punkt.ch/products/mc03-premium-secure-smartphone There's a little bit - but barely - more about AphyOS in the FAQ if you scroll way down.
- Barbing 5mo agoNo way they employ a minor dark pattern with their cookie pop-up YIKES tying privacy hardware to a subscription. Maybe they’re two-year burners then, like a partially inverted warranty. Gradual feature deactivation should be fine if it’s incredibly transparent. So they lose too many sales if they just charge the whole lifetime customer value right upfront, and subscription is the solution. Thank you for that. Well I do wish them luck!
- lproven 5mo ago> But what will my phone still actually be able to do if / when I stop my subscription? I have two of them and use one as my spare phone. I wrote this article. As far as I can tell: all that happens is that you lose your encrypted email account and cloud storage. That's it. Otherwise, the phone continues working as before.
- skc 5mo agoMany years later and I'm still bitter that the tech press laughed Windows Phone out of the room straight to its demise. Yes it had very little developer support but at some point things were looking up. It was just the butt of too many jokes from influential people. A third ecosystem right now would have been amazing
- The_President 5mo agoThe Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete, not the press. Not many tech products exite me less than the concept of a Microsoft Windows 365 Copilot Cortana phone.
- _old_dude_ 5mo agoYes, and let's not forget Stephen Elop's 'Burning Platform' Memo https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2031 https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-TEB-2031
- The_President 5mo agoPaywalled for me
- bookofjoe 5mo agohttps://sriramk.com/memos/elop-burning-platforms.pdf https://sriramk.com/memos/elop-burning-platforms.pdf
- The_President 5mo agoThink I'll look for it myself thanks. Hackernews.pdf - that is a pass.
- michaelt 5mo ago> The Windows phone didn't make it due to Microsoft failing to compete As I recall Microsoft threw quite a lot of resources into Windows Phone. My then-employer had apps for Android and Apple, and Microsoft literally paid for us to port it to Windows Phone. Microsoft brought Nokia, who had dominated the industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And Microsoft was early to the mobile party too - you could get an iPaq H3660 running Microsoft Pocket PC 2000, seven years before the first iPhone. Keyboardless Fujitsu and Compaq tablets ran Windows XP Tablet PC Edition in 2003, seven years before the iPad. They weren't as good as what came later. Chunky, fragile devices, resistive touchscreens, stylus input with a tiny on-screen keyboard, worse batteries, worse wifi, barely any mobile data. And at the time, $500 seemed hugely expensive compared to a normal phone, even if these days there are plenty of $1000 smartphones. But there's an alternate reality where Microsoft had a 'first mover advantage' and captured a big slice of the smartphone-and-tablet market.
- mentos 5mo agoWhat would a mobile OS look like if the browser became the operating system and apps were sandboxed WASM instead of native APKs?
- skeeter2020 5mo agoPalm webOS has entered the chat!
- lproven 5mo agoStill maintained, still sold. https://www.lg.com/us/webos https://www.lg.com/us/webos Could be revived if anyone could be bothered.
- drzaiusx11 5mo agoMaybe someone could revive FirefoxOS
- R_Spaghetti 5mo agothis is what we need
- lproven 5mo agoNews just in. It happened in 2017. https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KaiOS 2017 is also the year ChromeBooks first outsold Macs (by value, not units). 2017 was the Year of Linux on the Desktop, and the penguin taleban didn't even notice.
- icapybara 5mo agoI guess what would be the advantage? You move up another layer of software. Is it any different from the OS?
- attila-lendvai 5mo agoerr, what? not a single mention of grapheneos in the entire article?
- lproven 5mo agoI wrote it. It is not about phone OSes. It is not about phone hardware. It is about phone VENDORS. The last paragraph should also explain this to you.
- jiehong 5mo agoHarmonyOS from Huawei is no longer based on Android, but it’s not an open OS.
- netfortius 5mo agoEvery such post brings tears to my Nokia history filled eyes...
- hacker_homie 5mo agoThings could have been so different.
- pbgcp2026 5mo ago... if it was not for Eternal September, yes :-) I miss those days. Good luck to you, stranger.
- LorenDB 5mo agoIt makes me sad that the F(x)tec Pro1 X never got a successor. It looks like a very cool phone.
- lproven 5mo agoAgreed. Apparently the company worked on the Punkt phones.
- sedan_baklazhan 5mo agoI'm writing this reply from an AuroraOS phone (a descendant of Sailfish OS). Yes, it is quite hard to get a non-duopoly smartphone..
- greatgib 5mo agoWhat I miss a lot is to be able to have a kind of "virtual" android running in a cloud instance. That could look legit to Google to not be restricted by integrity check and all. But there I could share access to my single instance to my multiple non Google non play store devices, eventually sharing access between multiple persons... Like for example, every crappy things like banks nowadays requires their own shitty app. It might be a pain in the ass to share between phones or to reinstall if you lose or change your phone. And all these useless app consume really a lot of storage resulting in my phone's being always full. That would be perfect to access it in a kind of remote access for use once in a while.
- stephbook 5mo agoI've only looked into one device en detail, the Jolla. Okay, no touch typing, maps apps don't start or don't find your location, WhatsApp probably doesn't work and I guess I don't have to start with banking apps.
- nizbit 5mo agoWonder how this works in a byod corp environment?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5mo agoThe challenge isn't buying it, the challenge is being able to do phone things with it. Nowadays, you can no longer exist in society without a phone. Most things will work but it takes one critical service that doesn't have a viable workaround, and you're forced to buy (and possibly carry) a "mainstream" phone just for that. Banking, government, authentication, postal service and public transit apps are just some of the common categories that will, in the end, force you to use one of those systems, unless governments mandate viable alternatives. The QR-code based recaptcha that's being introduced will be another brick in the wall. As an individual, it feels like my options are to either submit or try to live a hermit's life, bringing endless suffering and exclusion to myself.
- t1234s 5mo agoBingo.. we will all need to pick which prison we walk ourselves in to: Google or Apple
- SoftTalker 5mo agoYou can exist, but life will be as inconvenient as it was in the 1990s (though importantly, it didn't seem inconvenient at the time, it was just the way things were).
- amunozo 5mo agoI disagree. You cannot even book appointments in a lot of banks today, a thing you could do in the 90s. Like that, a lot of services are unavailable without a smartphone and its non-smartphone equivalent is not available anymore.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoNot my experience. I'm in the USA, and there are still bank branches everywhere, I'd say as many as ever and new ones are being built. In fact within a mile of my house the finishing touches on the latest new one (full remodel of a former restaurant building) are just about done.
- ALLTaken 5mo agoSounds very much like HarmonyOS. I was just in a Huawei Store and I think from a UI/UX perspective, despite being quite new, it's incredibly slick and leaps ahead in great design and integration within the HarmonyOS ecosystem. Even saw it being used as Laptop OS and Mobile, the convergence is quite applaudable. The kindest was that the store's staff advised against buying the device as it's quite painful to use it with Google's apk & blobs, because it drains more battery than when it's integrated with your system services directly. I told him, that maybe rare, but I'm actually happy to not use Google apps as much as possible and especially not within my operating system. Another point he made was that 5G'A is blocked by Google, about that I know nothing to be honest. Some Android forks are indeed quite nice, but the issue has always been the updating model, upstream maintenance and compatibility. With Harmony OS a large cooperation with the consumers in focus and the one developing the entire hardware stack is behind the OS development and maintenance making it safer against supply-chain hacks and a deeper integration possible than any other OS.
- pjmlp 5mo agoThe next version of it, HarmonyOS NEXT is microkernel based, and they have two new languages of their own. ArkTS, inspired in Typescript and similar nodejs runtime. Naturally due to performance problems, they decided to come up with another one, also Typescript inspired, but ahead of time compiled, GC and effects. It is called Canjgie. This naturally is a big effort rebooting the whole ecosystem, it only works because Huawei could focus on the Chinese market after losing Android.
- zb3 5mo agoOk, but that HarmonyOS NEXT is closed source and Huawei devices don't allow system modifications, right? There's "OpenHarmony", but the question is whether we can practically run it on Huawei devices..
- pjmlp 5mo agoMost likely, but that wasn't the point I was answering to. Open Harmony apparently is Huawei trying their own version of something like AOSP. Most of the documents seem to only exist in chinese.
- pokstad 5mo agoThe majority of these phones are running a modified version of Android. I wouldn’t call that non-Google. There is a total lack of diversity in the phone market. I’ve been trying to find a minimal feature phone for my kids and looked at Nokia, but non-Android Nokia phones don’t support enough US cellular bands.
- w4rh4wk5 5mo agoAt this point, I am thinking about connecting a stock Android phone to a server and access it via scrcpy from my laptop whenever I need to interact with some stupid app bs that could've just been a website. At least this way I can keep the majority of bloat away from primary communications device.
- igor47 5mo agoOr maybe just an android emulator? I wonder if this would actually work...
- atmanactive 5mo agoMost probably not due to device attestation.
- everyone 5mo agoA less drastic option is get an Android phone and put Lineage Android on it. https://lineageos.org/ https://lineageos.org/ There's a bunch of officially supported phones but most Android phones will have unofficial support also.
- opan 5mo agoI would highly recommend getting a device with official support for the best experience. I wouldn't get any phone not on their supported devices list unless it were free of charge, and even then I'd be a bit sad.
- ecesena 5mo agoI’m surprised that the Seeker is not even mentioned. I understand it’s Solana, it’s blockchain, whatever people think about it... to me it’s the only serious attempt at creating an app store that can compete with apple or google. What’s the point of independent hardware if the whole sw stack is them?
- Youden 5mo agoYou mean https://solanamobile.com/seeker https://solanamobile.com/seeker ? All of the copy seems to be built around Solana, "Web3" and crypto. It doesn't seem to have any appeal outside of that. It's not clear what the software even is. The docs [0] seem to indicate it's just Android, with some SDKs for interacting with the "Web3" stuff. This isn't a "serious attempt at creating an app store that can compete with apple or google", it's just another "Web3" project. It's exciting to people within that ecosystem and utterly uninteresting to anybody who isn't. 0: https://docs.solanamobile.com/get-started/development-setup https://docs.solanamobile.com/get-started/development-setup
- krembo 5mo ago< it was 18 cm long, 9 cm wide, and 2.8 cm thick, and weighed just over a third of a kilo. (For our readers in Liberia, Myanmar and elsewhere, that's 7 × 3½ × 1.1 inches, and ¾ lb.) LMAO
- lproven 5mo ago:-D Glad you liked it.
- stgo 5mo agoI've been the owner of a murena (fairphone + /e/OS) for many years. I've never had the opportunity to check its repairability, that darn thing hasn't broken yet.
- anjel 5mo agoSo what happens when Law Enforcement plugs into your non apple, non Google Phones and runs its forensic apps on it?
- microtonal 5mo agoThey are all most likely trivially compromised. Most of these phones do not have secure enclaves (which e.g. the iPhone had since 2013 and Google Pixel for ages as well) and are usually way behind with Linux security patches, firmware security patches, Android patches outside ASBs. For instance some of the alternatives in the article are routinely 2-5 years behind on Linux and firmware security updates.
- anjel 5mo agoNot a minor shortcoming
- 7e 5mo agoA key question: do any of these phones run an open-source baseband radio? Is that even allowed?
- lproven 5mo agoI wrote the article. Not that I am aware of, no. They are almost all Android devices which are available unlocked and with a different OS on from new. It is possible, but nobody's done it since Symbian.
- getpvait22 5mo ago[dead]
- getpvait22 5mo ago[dead]
- lproven 5mo agoHey, that's my article. Thanks for sharing it! Here is some good practical info on the pros and cons of different de-Googled phone OSes: https://blog.gridranger.dev/mobile-oses-featuring-fairphone-5/ https://blog.gridranger.dev/mobile-oses-featuring-fairphone-...